Wednesday, 3 June 2009

In the next couple of weeks, we'll be releasing a MySource Mini update that contains much more advanced video management functionality than the first release. In typical MySource Mini style, it's simple and sexy while still being very powerful. And I've got some screenshots of the feature in development as a bit of a teaser.

Our end goal for this development was to allow users to upload any common video format and be able to embed it in their websites in a way that made it available to the highest number of site visitors. Like most video sharing websites, we decided on a Flash-based player and we will be creating our own player so we can skin it in the way users want.

We also had to take editing, thumbnails and versioning into account so movies fit seamlessly into the MySource Mini graphical environment.

Uploading a movie is as easy as uploading an image.

Once you've uploaded your movie, it is converted to an FLV file automatically so we can play it using our flash player. The original file is retained so you can link to your high quality MOV/AVI/etc. if you'd like. We also extract thumbnails from the movie so you can select the one that fits the best without having to create your own.

In the future, we'll be adding an option that allows you to replace this thumbnail with one you have created yourself, but we want to keep things simple to start with.

Now that your movie is loaded into the system, you will be able to embed it into any page using the Viper WYSIWYG editor. It will be the same process as inserting an image, but we are still building this WYSIWYG plugin so I can't show you any screens of it yet.

Versioning is great feature of MySource Mini and movies fit nicely into the whole system. Just like with pages, you can flick through different versions of your movie by looking at quick-loading images. Even if you've uploaded a large movie, this montage-based preview allows you to quickly scan through versions without having to download each one. When you've found the one you like, you can download it as normal.

The movie shown above is an old preview of the MySource Mini caching system, so the whole movie looks similar. I've also got a more interesting image for an old versioning system preview movie.

About Me

I'm the product development manager at Squiz Labs, managing the MySource Matrix and MySource Mini CMS development teams.I'm also the lead developer of a PEAR package called PHP_CodeSniffer, designed to check PHP code for violations of a defined coding standard.